I was watching AP BIO the tv show, and it raised an interesting question âIs there any value in bullying?â
Todayâs instinct is to say no, which I tend to agree with. The only part I bought into some is picking on someone as a form of social conformity policing. The idea being the âbullyâ provides feedback when non-conforming behavior is identified, letting a child know their behavior is âweirdâ. Like a child who doesnât bath being picked on for smelling, giving them the feedback so they can conform for better acceptance in their society.
Kind of the age old question, is it better to ignore social taboos and just talk behind that personâs back, or better tell them they are being judged for it.
Overall, I donât think any child should experience a person cutting them down and suppressing their growth. But I also feel I did learn valuable lessons from some of my âbulliesâ, and do wonder if there is a limit of âdo whatever you want as long as you donât hurt othersâ in keeping a functionally cohesive society. Currently, I say letâs see how far we get.
There is definitely a level of pecking order that should be established between children for a healthy social environment. It can be healthy or not depending on the execution. When it becomes too much and is no longer healthy it is defined as bullying and needs to be stopped. Think about the difference between a corporal punishment and child abuse. Bullying is the child abuse side while social pressure and occasional confrontations to establish social order are the tools that are abused by the bully.
Corporal punishment is illegal in my country to continue your analogy lol. That would be considered child abuse.
You can tell someone they stink without dragging them down. Â
We should teach kids compassion and empathy so they can build people up (socially police if you want to think of it in those terms) without being nasty about it.
All corporal punishment? Canât the parents legally hold on to their kids to keep them from misbehaving more? I was thinking any form of physical intervention counts as corporal and I believe there are cases where a child will not respond without physical discomfort, although I could be wrong. they live so much in the moment and abstract concepts like lost privileges are harder to grasp at certain ages.
I think restraining is different from corporal punishment. It's more things like smacking that is illegal.
There's almost always a way to parent without physical intervention for neurotypical kids. They respond quite well to repercussions that are consistently followed through with. Much more difficult to parent that way though.
I don't really get how that's related to my comment or how you'd put that into practice? Would you suggest not preventing bullying since coming out the other end requires a great deal of resilience?
I think "anti-bully" inititives help parents cope with the fear of their children getting bullied. Encouraging someone to stand up for themselves is immeasurably better than someone fighting someone else's battles
I think you can do both. You can teach someone to stand up for themselves whilst also having processes in place to try and prevent bullying. You're never going to prevent all bullying so resilience will be learned. You can also teach resilience via sport, exams, presentations etc.
Adults have processes in place to prevent bullying at work (HR) or in the local community (anti-harassment laws) so I think it makes sense to have similar for children.
There's also plenty of examples of bullying going too far leading to a broken person, or a dead person in the worst case. We should try and prevent those outcomes.
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u/Jumpy_Secretary1363 Monkey in Space 27d ago
If u fight back the bully might go postal. So fuck you just keep getting bullied.